Continuity is needed to develop Ghana

Fellow Ghanaians, permit me to share this open secret with you. Without the honest and stringent application of the secret to be shared, it will take Ghana “donkey years”, if not forever, to struggle to develop to the level of Rwanda or any of the civilized western countries.

The Ghanaian is known for a fact to want to live a better life but without seriously toiling or wiping off any sweat from their forehead.

This is so with many Ghanaians living in Ghana but not those living abroad where they have to work their arse off (work very hard) to make their money or else, “Kwasi Broni” will kick them out of their job.

In Ghana, many of the people in the public service have cultivated that devastating nonchalance and lackadaisical attitude to work.

They claim the public service work they do is for the government but neither theirs nor their parents’ hence just do it haphazardly. They don’t care about the success or downfall of whichever public institution has employed them.

Such deplorable and wicked attitude to work by the Ghanaian is foreign to the people in the Whiteman’s land. This is because anyone who does his job anyhow will sooner be caught in the web of the law and the company policies to consequently be dealt with hence their culture of seriousness to work, whether in the public or in the private sector.

Going back to the topic of discussion, it takes a continuously proper and serious attitude to work for success to be achieved in any undertaking. It does not take cyclically intermittent and alternating seriousness and laziness to work to develop a nation or bring about the satisfactory success of a company.

In this wise, the one step forward and two steps backward as it has become the character of political governance in Ghana, dotted with official corruption, deliberate sabotage, partisanship, and political polarization, will lead Ghana nowhere near the socio-economic development Ghanaians yearn for.

Such characterisation will only spiral the country into an inextricable cycle of underdevelopment beset with crimes of all sorts to the detriment of the citizenry.

No wonder that Ghana is at the moment afflicted with armed robberies, issues of insecurity, purposeful instigation of the public for parochial political interests of some political parties, the insane undermining of others for selfish reasons, and wanton destruction of properties, e.g. markets, through arson.

To be frank with the public, the current democracy in practice in Ghana is not good. It can never bring about the development of the country, concluding from the strong desire by a political party to do whatever is within their capability to undermine the ruling government to cause their failure in order that they can come back to power.

What about the persistent failure of the successive governments to continue to complete projects left half-completed by their predecessors?

They abandon such projects to start their own for reasons only best known to them but at a great cost to the nation. Such abandoned projects are the taxpayers’ money gone to waste.

With our current practice of democracy where laws are not enforced as they should, permitting even law enforcement agents like the police to become corrupt hence morally and professionally weak, how can the country develop?
The government often gets scared when a section of the public objects to its policies and programmes with the threat of “we shall not vote for you come to the next general election”

No matter how well such policies and programmes are, the government may decide to abandon them in the hope of not incurring any further wrath of the public.

Take the fight against the devastating illegal surface and alluvial mining (galamsey), for example. As the NPP government is eager to fight it, the NDC is going around promising those engaged in that trade favourable terms and assurances to resource them to intensify their work should they, the NDC, come to power, although the galamsey is ruining the nation’s water bodies, fertile and arable lands and forests.

Without continuity of government, policies, and programmes, Ghana will never develop but be remained mired in economic stagnation, if not retrogression.

Rwanda could not have developed to its current admirably envious state without the continuity in governance under the able leadership of selfless, well-focused, dynamic, farsighted, incorruptible, and honest His Excellency the President, Paul Kagame. Has he not been in power for continuous twenty years?

Malaysia is understandably far developed than Ghana, although it had its political independence from the British on 31 August 1957, almost around the same time as Ghana (6 March 1956).

Why is this so? It is all because their visionary leader who developed the nation, Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, ruled the nation from 1981 to 2003 and again from May 2018 to March 2020 before he resigned.

Singapore, a very poor country without any proper natural resources, has been able to turn herself into the economic tiger of the Far East thanks to the visionary, dynamic, selfless, honest, incorruptible, and able leadership of their late Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew.

He ruled the nation from 1959 to 1990. Singapore only gained its full independence as a sovereign state separate from independent Malaysia on 9 August 1965.

These three above-mentioned countries are just a few among the many seriously developed countries that had visionary and honest leaders ruling them longer than the alternating or rotating but corrupt 8-year term between the NDC and NPP in Ghana with all their backbiting, undermining, and visionless.

If there were to be a proper continuity in governance in Ghana, a visionary leader could take long term policies and programmes in the best interest of the people and the country without succumbing to the threats of “we shall not vote for you if you do this or that” nonsense, as has become the weapon to wield by many an ignorant Ghanaian or saboteur.

It takes continuity to develop a nation.

To be continued.